The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. Volume 20, No. 571 (Supplementary Number)

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Mr. Cunningham relates some interesting particulars of this period. Before Sir Walter was two years old, his nurse let him fall out of her arms, so as to injure his right foot, and render him lame for life: "This accident did not otherwise affect his health; he was, as I have been informed by a lady who chanced to live near him, a remarkably active and dauntless boy, full of all manner of fun, and ready for all manner of mischief. He calls himself, in one of his introductions to Marmion—

and I have heard it averred, that the circumstance of his lame foot prompted him to take the lead among all the stirring boys in the street where he lived, or the school which he attended: he desired, perhaps, to show them, that there was a spirit which could triumph over all impediments."3 If this statement be correct, it is a somewhat remarkable coincidence with the circumstance of Lord Byron's lameness; though, happily, the influence of the accident on the temperament of Scott is not traceable beyond his early years.

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Sir Walter was subsequently removed from Edinburgh, for the improvement of his health, to the farm-house of Sandyknowe, then inhabited by his paternal grandfather, and situated in the loveliest part of the Vale of Tweed. In the neighbourhood, upon a considerable eminence, stands Smailholm Tower, a Border fort which the future poet enshrined in his admirable ballad, The Eve of St. John. The romantic influence of the scenery of the whole district is told with much vigour and sweetness in the introduction to the third canto of Marmion.

In 1783, Scott was placed at the University of Edinburgh, where his studies were as irregular as at the High School: at the latter he is said to have made his first attempt at versification in the description of a thunderstorm in six lines, the recital of which afforded his mother considerable pleasure and promise; and, on another occasion, he is stated to have remarked, during a journey over a sterile district of Scotland, in a day of drizzling rain, "It is only nature weeping for the barrenness of her soil."

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